Smashup
I was pretty flip about the Marvel-Disney merger when news about it broke on Monday, but I do recognize that the deal has serious implications for the future of a wide range of franchises. io9 has a comprehensive breakdown of how various characters are tied up in licensing and theme-park deals. The Times suggests that the deal was motivated in part by a desire for Disney to lock up the boys-to-tween-men demographic to match the Jonas-Brothers-induced-haze the company has cast over girls. And Andrew O'Hehir over at Salon argues that it won't matter much because either Disney won't micromanage, as they've wisely done with Pixar, or because Disney bought Marvel at the time when the company's best potential was tapped, or because Marvel's just another big company now, so they were unlikely to produce innovative multi-media reinterpretations of their characters in any case.
I remain genuinely uncertain about what the merger will mean. But, because I'm going to bang this drum until I die or someone actually does it, how about this as an option? Disney's got a lot of little girls who watch a ton of stuff it produces. If it can hook them not just on Miley Cyrus, who is, after all, a kind of proto-superheroine, origin story and all, why not hook them on superwomen, far and away the most underutilized properties of companies like Marvel and DC. Disney could homegrow an audience for sophisticated superheroine blockbusters. And maybe we could actually get a She-Hulk movie some day. Jennifer Walters' story is so rife with cinematic potential that Dan Slott and Juan Bobillo actually joke about it in the early pages of Single Green Female. And she's only one of a raft of characters where you could do smart-but-cute animated origin stories series, do long animated movies like the one for Wonder Woman that came out earlier this year, and roll out the blockbusters once you've got that generation of girls primed both to appreciate superheroines out of nostalgia for their favorite childhood shows, and because watching a superwoman struggle with things like work-life balance will strike a chord. A girl can dream, right?